Category Archives: art

lawrence ferlinghetti’s birthday

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The fine poet, activist, and city-enlightener turned 90 on Tuesday 3.24.09. He’s still sharp, thoughtful, wise; he can still teach, is my point. As demonstration of which, The S.F. Chronicle published an interview, which I commend to you.

Here’s a nibble:

Q: Why do you prefer the term wide-open poetry to Beat poetry?

A: I never wrote ‘Beat’ poetry. Wide-open poetry refers to what Pablo Neruda told me in Cuba in 1950 at the beginning of the Fidelista revolution: Neruda said, ‘I love your wide-open poetry.’

He was either referring to the wide-ranging content of my poetry, or, in a different mode, to the poetry of the Beats. Wide-open poetry also refers to the ‘open form’ typography of a poem on the page. (A term borrowed from the gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Q: Can writing be taught?

A: It has to be taut.

awkwardness

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“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean if I stand in front of something instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”

– Diane Arbus, who would have been 86 today, if she hadn’t slipped betimes away from fields where glory does not stay, in 1971. (She offed herself, is my point.)


conscience

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“Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities when directing one’s course by it, one must still try to follow its direction.

-Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh has been my favorite painter since I was a baby. Really. My mother used to hold me up to see a print of one of his paintings of sunflowers and ask me who painted it. I was learning to talk, and I’d tell her.

Today I think he might have been better off not worrying about the direction of his compass, and just focusing on the brush in front of his nose. Some of us are born to create, and let the world find it’s own groove and it’s own grain to grind, is my point.

Posted in art

I want to go into the woods too

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Pbs.org:

A very interesting article on the 100th anniversary of the MacDowell Artists Colony in NH.

“One of the most important things is that you come into contact with other artists. I thought that I was the only one having difficulty starting a work. Everyone has difficulty starting a work, regardless of whether they’re composers or they’re painters or not. They said, “That is the most difficult thing.”

… Whether a start is made and whether the work done amounts to anything is up to the talents and tenacity of the artist, of course. The opportunity here is to go into the woods and see what one can do.